February - 2017

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A-J ARONSTEIN

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Gene II

Gene II

I found the note in a box of stamps that I hadn't seen before. My mother had brought them down from the attic. I had been taking time between jobs and spent some of it cleaning out old junk for her. Going through the boxes that she found. And out popped a note from Benjamin Alexander, who turned out to be -- in his time -- one of the leading researchers on hemophilia in the United States. To think of my grandparents in his office with my uncle, and to imagine them reading thi

Yatoans

Yatoans

I read some lines. Adrienne Rich, Paul Muldoon, Milosz. Nothing sticks in the brain’s oatmeal. The dryer buzzes. I open the door and hug the pile of warm socks, warm underwear, damp towels soaked in Tide. Then drop it all on my bed and pull the comforter over it, so the heap looks like the curve of someone’s body. I wait. I smell a chicken roasting, but can’t remember putting a chicken in the oven. I write some sentences in first-person-present. They are pleasing to me, but

Bathtub

Bathtub

On my knees, bent over the edge of the bathtub, scrubbing porcelain so hard that my fingernails hurt. Saturated with soap scum and mold. A weird yellow feeling. Can feelings have colors? Dressed in sweatpants and a 1999 Dexter High School walkathon t-shirt (mascot: the fighting pigeons). Sweating from the work. So out of shape. Need to run more. Be more disciplined. Write more. Think in straight lines toward solutions to current pressing life problems (finances a mess, Wanda

Easter Bunny

Easter Bunny

Every once in a while, my mother would bounce out of a pediatric practice. She would declare that she had grown fed up with nursing, with the corporatization of healthcare, with the bureaucracy of health insurance, with sticking sick kids with the same hepatitis B vaccines, with the flu, with scrubs. She would quit with gusto and embark upon some new adventure of self discovery. She would take time off to tend the vegetable patch in our backyard, where she grew peppers and to

Geyser

Geyser

The second time my mother and I went on a long vacation, we wen to San Francisco and then spent a few days driving around Napa and Sonoma in a neon yellow Chevy Aveo – the tiniest and cheapest car available. It had manual windows and locks, something that I hadn’t seen in years. When we pulled up to the Ritz-Carlton valet in that Aveo, I thought that the guys in their uniforms did a pretty good job not laughing. What do I remember from that one? The geyser. That was the trip

Creosote

Creosote

We were at a birthday party in Los Angeles last weekend drinking tiki cocktails and I got chatting with some handsome motherfucker from the Valley. I’d had a few and when I do, I typically get kind of intense in a hurry with strangers. I don’t like talking about what people do for a living and hate hearing the background radiation of loneliness and disappointment with themselves when they yammer on about their jobs. So instead, I stared into the brown eyes of this guy and ask

Statement

Statement

I’m not what you would call an intellectual type. I know it. But I’m not about to start apologizing for the way that I was raised, or the decisions I made about my life once they were mind to make them. I got here on my own terms. Made what I could out of my own material. Out of what raw materials I was given, and the abilities that I could muster to make out of them. Did I perhaps overdo it along the way? Did I forget myself along the way? You bet. But five times out of ten,

Lagoon 2

Lagoon 2

Hal was quiet when he got to my apartment on Friday night. Mindy dropped him off and I had dinner ready to go – chicken cutlets with mashed potatoes and some spinach salad. He came in and didn’t say anything at all. I don’t know. Sometimes he has a tough time switching between us. Sometimes, I wonder if he’s become a different person for each of us. I wonder if there’s maybe something hard for a kid about trying to please two different people. Then other times I’m just plain

Tower

Tower

Malcolm awoke early to beat the rush. His wife Tina, warm and heaving softly beside him, would have just crawled into bed two hours before. She worked late nights and Malcolm worked the regular day shift. They lived in a building that had been popular with financial services managers, traders, executives. The kinds of folks who left in the first big wave. Tina had a cousin who worked at one of the big firms and she kept an eye on the lists for coming vacancies. They had been

Sparrow 2

Sparrow 2

Ultimately, though, I cared too much about Riga’s opinion and couldn’t find a way out of the situation. I looked up Helen’s number and called her office. I told her the situation that I had on my hands – dying bird, impact trauma, certain death. She came down to my office with a brown paper bag, a net, and a pair of cloth gloves. For some reason, she was also wearing what looked like a safari hat. “To the rescue,” she said, altogether too loud given what had definitely been a

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